The Home of Australian Craft Beer

Colonial Brewery Brewery

Margaret River is home to more microbreweries than any other region of Australia. Among them is a handful that boast mightily impressive homes, such as Colonial Brewing Co: a sleek, contemporary affair sat amid 70 acres of sprawling farmland. Founded in 2004, it combines a family-friendly brasserie & brewery focused on creating "beers with integrity", a large kids' play area and a wide lawn that regularly hosts live music, DJs and mini-festivals.

You'll find Colonial Brewing Co’s beers pouring at venues all around WA and Victoria too, venues as varied as Melbourne's Lucky Coq, Hawker Hall, Cookie, The Botanical and Half Moon. The company now operates a second, larger brewery in Port Melbourne too, helping get more of the beers into the hands of drinkers on the East Coast.

Both brewery sites also operate canning lines too. Initially, this allowed the WA brewery to put the beer formerly known as Kolsch out as Draught, as well as the first batches or Small Ale. Since installing the line in Melbourne, a number of the brewery's core range beers have been released in cans too, including its Pale and IPA.

For visitors to the WA venues, there's plenty to tempt those not interested in beer, from the selection of wines from the region to a fresh and simple menu done well (especially the pizzas...). In a drive to reduce food miles, they've developed a half acre kitchen garden and orchard too.

It's an approach in keeping with the overall aim at Colonial's home base: to create an authentic, unpretentious and convivial atmosphere in which their beers can be enjoyed by families, tourists, beer lovers and beer novices alike.

Colonial Brewery Regulars

Another beer ideal for wiling away a hot afternoon in Margaret River, this is a Belgian style witbier brewed with citrus peel and toasted coriander seeds. The result is a refreshing blend of light citrus fruitiness and aromatic spices, with a dryness to finish that makes it easier to head back for one more.…
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Pale Yellow

Style

Witbier

ABV

5%

Colonial Brewery Specials

Tapped May 9th, 2018

Porter. Noun. A person employed to carry luggage and other loads, especially in a railway station, airport, hotel or market.
This eponymous beer style evolved from the dockside strongmen’s favoured dark quencher in 1700s London, becoming, at one period during the following century, the most consumed beer style in the world. These days, with pale lagers holding that mantle by some considerable margin, this most malt focused of beers has become more of a respected classic, one pulled from the lesser…
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Tapped May 3rd, 2018

Colonial Brewing Co’s latest Project Beer riffs on late 60s/early 70s supergroup Crosby, Stills and Nash in a way that not only neatly draws together the collaborative efforts of this gin infused double IPA but also offers a handy reference point for how the elements come together, in this case in the glass rather than via counterculture-inspiring vocal harmonic dexterity.
Using the Idaho 7 hop variety from Oregon’s Crosby Hop Farm and some Willamette atop a relatively lean and slightly cloudy…
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Golden Yellow

Style

Gin Infused IIPA

ABV

7.5%

Stockists

On a limited, draught only tour through good Australian venues and growler filling retailers

Tapped March 25th, 2016

In 2015, Colonial Brewing Co hooked up with the organisers of the Emergence Creative Festival in Margaret River. The result was the design of the cans for the brewery's Small Ale, the hoppy 3.5 percent ABV mid-strength they'd been honing in draught form for some time. As well as the sweet design, the beer saw them debut the 360 degree, flip top cans that effectively become an aluminium glass once opened (turning plenty of heads when The Crafty Pint and friends popped them in the Supernatural Amphitheatre…
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Tapped July 11th, 2014

'I had a Truffle Tripel at the Truffel Kurfuffle.â? Try saying that after a few of them at the annual Truffle Kerfuffle festival in Manjimup, sponsored by Colonial Brewing... The Truffle Tripel was created by the Margaret River brewer for the festival and is a Belgian style ale using fresh local truffles that follows in the footsteps of their truffle porter in 2013. Only 11 kegs were concocted by the brewers at the Edith Cowan University (ECU) brewhouse using five kilos of truffles from The Wine…
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Tapped September 6th, 2013

It seems that the deeper you delve into the minds of the brewers at Margaret River's Colonial Brewery, the murkier things get. There's an obsession with "Gary", something we don't fully understand but with which we totally empathise given there's something of a "Gary" obsession here too. Something we do understand is that there's a new series of limited releases coming out under the Project Beer banner - we know this as we ran a story on it. Yet we're still not totally sure what…
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Tapped June 12th, 2013

It's fair to say that Team America is a pretty popular film at Crafty Towers. The Pint family calls each other Gary in honour of the film's hero, Mrs Pint bought the soundtrack and discovered with glee that there are extra verses to many of the film's songs and, almost a decade on from its release, it's quite terrifying how much of the phraseology around the house can be traced back to the film too. So any beer that also takes its name from Mr Johnston and lifts quotes from the film in its tasting…
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Tapped March 22nd, 2013

They love their German beers at Colonial, in particular rare or forgotten styles. For this, their latest foray into that nation's beer history, they've headed to the forests of Bavaria and seem to have been inspired to even greater levels. The beer's release comes with a colourful tale about the origins of the beer that includes references to "flickers of sunlight flowing down", "strong, noble common folk" and "little bundles of yeasty joy". Essentially, it seems that…
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Tapped December 6th, 2012

Mal Secourable, head brewer at Margaret River's Colonial Brewing Company, loves to brew German-inspired styles. It seems that he loves brewing them so much that it's impossible for us to get him to take the time out to tell us about any specials he's brewed. Thankfully, with Girl+Beer now calling the region her home, we have Crafty spies on the ground... Which means we know about the Kottbusser, a summer seasonal from Mal, which follows hot on the heels of the brewery's popular Baltic Porter. It's…
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The Crafty Pint is an independent online magazine and resource for anyone interested in craft beer in Australia. We bring an honest, old-fashioned journalistic approach to beer's brave new world, telling stories because they're worth telling not because someone is paying us to write them.

Like many of the people who have changed the face of beer in Australia, we believe in authenticity, integrity, enjoyment and love. We hope to play a role in helping good beer, brewed by good people, find its way into the hands of more drinkers.